eating cucumbers without permission...

See thou mine own coin-purse? It hath upon it written "Foul Oedipus."

JULES presses his knife to BRETT's throat
J: Speak 'What' again! Thou cur, cry 'What' again!
I dare thee utter 'What' again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but 'What',
Of Marsellus Wallace!
B: He is dark.
J: Aye, and what more?
B: His head is shaven bald.
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: What?
JULES strikes and BRETT cries out
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: Nay!
J: Then why didst thou attempt to bed him thus?

By Kevin Pease

It's insane. We honestly have no idea how this all happened. The original marketing plan for Once was to get one 35mm print made, which was going to cost us like four grand. A lot of money. We were going to drive around Ireland in a car, and [writer/director] John [Carney] was going to introduce the film. We figured there were enough Frames fans in Ireland to fill the cinemas. I was going to play a few songs with Mar at the end, and we were going to sell the DVD on the way out. That was huge.

Walls dripping blood, shower curtain complete with silhouette, even a plan for towels embroidered "Bates Motel".

In a 1984 interview with Charles Tesson in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Hu made a pretty surprising statement when discussing Come Drink With Me:"I didn't want to use real martial arts what we call real kung-fu. I had seen it in tournaments, I didn't find it very beautiful and I didn't understand a thing about it; as a matter of fact, I still don't." The question practically asks itself: how could a man with no interest in martial arts revolutionize martial arts cinema? The fact of the matter is, Hu never saw the martial arts in his films solely as "action"; for him, to have "action" occur on the screen was not enough to make a film an action movie. The kung-fu in Come Drink With Me (and in his later Wuxia films like Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch Of Zen) was never conceived as actual confrontation, but as dance, performance. In fact, the action in the film(s) is choreographed to the performing style of Beijing Opera and the rhythm and beat of its orchestral score (a score mainly performed by traditional instruments from Opera, the wailing flute and the Chinese tempo-drums).

Most people know two things about the Hays Code. One is that the bedrooms of all married couples could contain only twin beds, which had to be at least 27 inches apart. The other is that although the Code was written in 1930, it was not enforced until 1934, and that as a result, the "pre-Code cinema" of the early 1930s violated its rules with impunity in a series of "wildly unconventional films" that were "more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre" than in any other period of Hollywood's history.

Neither of these things is true.

The way we determine what's true or false, real or artificial, good or bad in movies tends to be highly individual. As a reviewer, I'm obliged to give movies star ratings, but they're simply a summary of my personal response, not a declaration of some objective value and certainly not of any sort of consensus. I was taken aback recently when I received a couple of e-mails from Star Wars fans asking how I could have concluded eight years ago that the "special edition" rerelease of that film was "worthless" when it gave so much pleasure to so many people. I might have given it an even lower rating if I could have, but all I meant by giving it no stars was that it was worthless to me. I'm not qualified to speak about its value to anyone else.

In my reviews I try to describe the paths that lead to my subjective response so that readers can decide whether some part of my path might be theirs too. In the case of Crash I may blanch at Haggis's narrative contrivances and think two stars, though I did enjoy them (three stars). But the vision of Los Angeles that they're designed to express strikes me as just and vital (four stars). So I wind up with an average of three. Viewers who find the vision uninteresting and the narrative contrivances acceptable but unenjoyable will come up with ratings of their own -- or arrive at the same rating for entirely different reasons.

1. Mel Gibson

"It would take place in ancient Egypt, be performed completely in hieroglyphics, and consist of 117 minutes of a slave being beaten to death."

Classic movie trailers -- the more lurid the better -- with commentary from the likes of Joe Dante, John Landis and Edgar Wright.

Measurements like average shot length can be surprisingly illuminating.

His next two projects are Redbelt, a martial arts drama starring Tim Allen, and Joan of Bark: The Dog that Saved France. Given his track record, I'm actually looking forward to these...

[Alison Bechdel's strip] popularized what is now known as the Bechdel Test, also named the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel's Law. Bechdel credits Liz Wallace for the test. The test appears in a 1985 strip entitled The Rule in which a character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:

1. It has to have at least two women in it, who
2. talk to each other about,
3. something besides a man.

You would be amazed, once you start watching for it, how very very rare this kind of scene is in movies, violent and non-.